In a secluded wood 55 miles east of Prague, smoking chimneys rise above the East Bohemian Chemical Enterprise. A large complex of ramshackle sheds and concrete buildings, the factory looks unprepossessing enough. But a "special production unit" is mixing batches of one of Czechoslovakia's most lethal exports: Semtex, the odorless, colorless plastic explosive of choice for terrorists the world over.
Semtex's most famous target was Pan Am Flight 103, which exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, in December 1988, killing all 259 on board and eleven people on the ground. Scottish officials have concluded that a terrorist group called the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command blew / up the plane by concealing Semtex in a radio-cassette player and smuggling it aboard in a suitcase. Semtex is also thought to have been used to destroy a French DC-10 over the Sahara last September, killing 170 people. While visiting London last week, President Vaclav Havel acknowledged that his Communist predecessors sold Libya alone 1,000 tons of the stuff. Said Havel: "If you consider that it takes 200 g ((6 oz.)) to blow up an aircraft, this means world terrorism has enough Semtex to last for 150 years."
Other plants in Czechoslovakia are engaged in similar businesses, producing all manner of weaponry and components -- hand grenades, automatic rifles, tanks, armored personnel carriers -- almost all for export. In a high-security compound outside the industrial city of Brno, trainees from such countries as Angola, South Yemen and the People's Republic of the Congo are being drilled in what officials describe as "police methodology and criminology," a euphemism for paramilitary training.
In the four months since they came to power, Havel and his democratically inclined colleagues have practically erased communism from political life. They are finding it far harder, however, to do away with another legacy: Czechoslovakia's extensive role as arms supplier to Communist regimes, liberation movements and outright terrorists. Says an Interior Ministry official: "The Communists may be gone, but they have locked us into a web of arms deals and even terrorism that may be impossible to escape."
Over the past 15 years, arms exports outside the Warsaw Pact have earned Czechoslovakia an average of $850 million annually in cash or such essential raw materials as oil and mineral ores; additional revenues flow in from the sale of ammunition. All told, the arms trade accounts for a quarter to a half of Czechoslovakia's foreign exchange earnings. Havel said last week his country would continue to sell arms to democracies but not to totalitarian regimes. However, cautions Foreign Ministry spokesman Lubos Dobrovsky, "we have existing obligations that we must honor."
Current clients include India, China, Cuba, Viet Nam, Syria, Iran and, biggest of all, Muammar Gaddafi's Libya. A large-scale purchaser on its own, Libya has long been known to be a conduit for Czechoslovak-made arms to such terrorist groups as Abu Nidal's Fatah Revolutionary Council, Italy's Red Brigades and the Irish Republican Army.